Craig Brown

“Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.”

“Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.”

“When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.”

“Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.”

“Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise.”

“The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.”

“Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.”

“What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now.”

“Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.”

“The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.”

“Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how.”

“How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'”

“Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.”

“When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read.”

“Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.”

“Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.”

“Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.”

“As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.”

“My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.”

“The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.”